Premier League

Docile Blackburn condemn Ince

Paul Ince walks back to the dressing room after watching Blackburn get beaten 3-0 by Wigan. Photograph: Paul Currie/Action Images

Appropriate for a man contemplating an execution, the Blackburn chairman, John Williams, wore a black cap as he watched a sixth successive defeat under Paul Ince. Four points from safety and with two 'winnable' fixtures against Stoke and Sunderland to come, the thoughts of the Blackburn board are fixed on who might actually win them.

In 1998, with the club bottom of the table, Jack Walker, the man who created the modern Blackburn, fired Roy Hodgson as manager 10 minutes after a defeat to Southampton. If and when Ince's dismissal comes, it will appear more like a mercy killing after what he admitted had been a damning performance.

'When you perform as badly as we did in the first 45 minutes, there doesn't appear to be anything you can do,' Ince said. 'We improved in the second half, but there is no point improving when you are two down after 12 minutes. The game was gone. It doesn't matter if you are Alex Ferguson or Fabio Capello, you can't do much from that position. We went out there and we froze and all the preparation in the world cannot help you with that.'

The Blackburn players had called a team meeting on Thursday, after which the midfielder David Dunn pronounced that team spirit was excellent and that they were fully behind their manager. They may as well have remained in the dressing room, played cards and handed round a bottle of whisky.

After 12 minutes, Blackburn were two down and arguing among themselves. Had Lee Cattermole not finished off a beautifully fluid move, triggered by the afternoon's outstanding figure, Antonio Valencia, by heading against the crossbar, the game would have been hopelessly lost before Dunn came on immediately after the interval.

In the event, Cattermole did score the goal his play deserved and, perhaps fittingly, Blackburn's best chance came when Roque Santa Cruz not so much squandered an open goal as cleared off the Wigan line.

All the damage was inflicted before a quarter of an hour was gone and mainly by Valencia, who tormented Stephen Warnock. First, the left-back was turned by the winger, whose low cross was back-heeled past Paul Robinson in an act of lethal delicacy from Emile Heskey.

Two minutes later, the Ecuadorean decided that he required no help, brushing past Warnock and driving towards Robinson's goal without feeling the breath of a challenge. Behind the net, the Blackburn fans chanted that their manager would be sacked in the morning. Walker would not have given him that long.

THE FANS' PLAYER RATINGS AND VERDICT

Dave Whalley, Observer reader We made a fantastic start to the game and, for the first 25 minutes, Valencia simply tore Warnock apart every time he had the ball. After that we took our foot off the gas a little, but it was an important win for the club going into the Christmas break. We're on a good run at the moment, last week aside, and this result opens some daylight between us and the teams in the relegation zone. It also shows that, if we can retain the nucleus of our side, we are strong enough to cement ourselves as a top-10 club and put up a realistic challenge for a European place. We've probably added to Ince's woes – Blackburn certainly looked demoralised at the back and, after we scored our first two goals, they seemed to struggle for confidence.

Paul McGarry, Observer reader It was a very poor performance. The game was effectively over in the opening minutes and, along with it, Paul Ince's tenure at the club. We huffed and puffed a bit throughout the match but it was obvious Santa Cruz didn't want to be there and we were never in the game – the only high note was David Dunn's introduction in the second half. It's not all Ince's fault, the players have to shoulder some of the responsibility and we've not spent as much money as the clubs around us, but his player selection and tactics haven't helped. Still, there's little evidence he can produce a recovery – Rovers have been playing relegation football for months and it's hard to see that changing now. As a result, Ince's position as manager no longer seems tenable.